ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book helps to understand gender in the Middle Ages by analyzing how a woman's place in the religious majority or one of the minority communities shaped her commercial and legal life. It argues that a Christian woman's relations to her father, husband, and son were the driving forces that shaped her life. Women were valuable in Perpignan for the assets they transmitted to their husbands and children or even preserved for parents. The book traces women's means of negotiating their relations with the families into which they were born and married. It analyzes what kings, legislators, and fathers believed to be the greatest role a woman could play, guardian for her fatherless children. The book focuses squarely on the role of widowed mothers in the practice of guardianship.
